a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Hannah Arendt

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.[/b]

Or, alternately, both.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

A little help here please.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

Well, they are after all objectivists.

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story … somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer … but nobody is the author …

I can live with that.

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules.

Also, never underestimate the general stupidity of the masses. I mean, look at Trumpworld.

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.

Needless to say, our rendition of their evil, not their rendition of ours.

[b]Existential Comics

I’ve always hated the word “melancholy”, and I’ve always loved the word “vainglorious”. I believe I will retain this attitude until the day I die.[/b]

Noted. Now let’s move on.

[b]How to win any argument online:

1. Willfully misinterpret your opponent.
2. Accuse them of believing something absurd that no one on Earth believes.
3. Vaguely clever zinger that has nothing to do with anything.[/b]

So, Kids, how does that strike you?

Property is theft.
Profit is theft.
Rent is theft.
Interest is theft.
Copyright is theft.
Shoplifting from Walmart is rad as hell and extremely good.

He may well be the last Communist on Earth.

I have no proof for this, but I feel like in America we have the best dogs. I walk around everyday and see all these nice dogs and I’m always like “there is no way they have this nice of dogs in France. No. Fucking. Way”.

Anyone from France able to rebut this?
How about the dogs in England?

People don’t want to admit it, but if Lenin were alive today he would have an extremely obnoxious Twitter account.

Imagine Stalin’s then.

Imagine how much better America would be if every adult American owned their very own guillotine.

Or, better still, their own nuclear arsenal.

[b]José Saramago

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you’re born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.[/b]

Let’s decide: Really, really dumb or really really brilliant.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

Let’s decide: Really, really dumb or really really brilliant.

…the only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see.

Among other things, how so?

… the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

Like a rose could ever give a shit.

…for human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born…

And, of course, die.

…all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

Not counting me of course.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.[/b]

Let’s try to guess what that is.

Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.

Yes, she actually did believe this. Though, sure, of some here it is probably true.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Unless, of course, you want to be a collectivist.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto–or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music.

Her music, no doubt, not mine.

I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing as beautiful as this should never allowed it to be erected. He should not want to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang out diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He’s given it to them and he’s made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn’t have offered it for men like you to look at. For men like you to talk about. He’s defiled his own work by the first word you’ll utter about it. He’s made himself worse than you are. You’ll be committing only a mean little indecency, but he’s committed a sacrilege. A man who knows what he must have known to produce this should not have been able to remain alive.

Maybe?

Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.

Or certainly one of them.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Aphorism is dead.
Like all of us.
Soon.[/b]

Or, sure, not soon enough.

No, hipsters, the Hitler mustache is not coming back, even ironically.

Since I don’t follow these things, is it?

Abraham Lincoln wrestled with depression, but that did not stop him from impersonating Daniel Day-Lewis while working as a cobbler in Venice.

You know, in a parallel universe.

Does anyone have a spare bunker?

Now that sounds ominous.

When you meet death, lower your head and charge.

Talk about futility!

Every month is crueler than the last. And then you die.

Eventually: Every hour is crueler than the last. And then you die

[b]Jessie Burton

For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?[/b]

That and all the real stuff.

Do you have a body if there is no one there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind floating around the rooms.

Most of course are content to touch it themselves.

You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.

Okay, but what if you are thrown into the ocean instead? The Pacific Ocean say.

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was – and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

How about “like most philosophers…”?

But how right is it to kill a man for something that is in his soul?

My guess: As right as you need it to be.

Nothing here is more fabulous than the truth.

In other words, one or the other.

[b]Lillian Hellman

You can’t recover from what you do not understand.[/b]

I know that I never have.

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.

True story: I have never been lonely.

The writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.

Let’s file this one under, “one woman’s opinion”.

Don’t you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

Yeah, he thought, but isn’t that true?

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

You know, if you’ve ever made any.

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

Let’s decide if this explains a lot or not.

[b]The Dead Author

A Brief History of Philosophy

1. Socrates deletes his account.
2. Plato posts screenshots of Socrates.
3. Aristotle unfollows Plato.
4. Aquinas retweets Jesus.
5. Descartes mutes Aquinas.
6. Locke mutes Descartes.
7. Kant unfollows Locke and Descartes.
8. Hegel subtweets Kant.
9. Schopenhauer blocks Hegel.
10. Marx likes Hegel.
11. Nietzsche gets hacked.
12. Heidegger DMs Arendt.
13. Adorno reports Heidegger.
14. Derrida gets verified.
15. Heidegger gets banned.
16. Wittgenstein only does instagram.[/b]

Though no doubt embellished one suspects.

You don’t have to believe in something to be disappointed by it.

And not just God.

Simile: Life is like hell.
Metaphor: Life is hell.
Allegory: Hell.

Just not literally.

The ironic thing about the past is that it starts when it’s over.

That and how one day it’s the same for the future.

Anxiety isn’t a lack of courage but a daily demand for it.

And when is there ever enough to go around?

Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ isn’t just a story about overwhelming state authority, but also about a white male banker who thinks he’s innocent, and readers somehow believing him.

You know, before he turns into a bug.

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.[/b]

In a word: distractions.

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

More or less what happened.

It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield – that is something different.
Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death.

Back again to my own tiny rendition of this.

…I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope—an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Probably true. But that never stopped me.

Labor is a man crowning glory.
Not this man’s.
I quote Marx.
I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.
I quote blisters.

Either that or calluses.

German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.

What’s that make Russian then?

[b]Colson Whitehead

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on "motherfucker.” [/b]

Try to guess the word mine is stuck on.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

Not many places that isn’t true of.

Why do you watch TV shows — and keep watching them — if you don’t like them? Terence asked.
Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.

I hear that. Perhaps even louder than you.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

Some of us are just lucky that way.

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

Imagine what your moment might be.

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

Or, sure, maybe not.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Our preferences are ultimately nonrational; things are good because they are preferred.” George Santayana[/b]

And how is that not a manifestation of dasein?

“There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.” August Strindberg

So, how do you assess mine?

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.” Empedocles

You know, if He even exists.

“But if one is doubting than one exists.” Rene Descartes

And who hasn’t doubted that from time to time?

“An idea is true if it works; truth happens to an idea; the true is whatever is expedient in the way of thinking.” William James

Let’s pick a truth and see.

“Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.” Willard Van Orman Quine

That and [eventually] syntax.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? We can only answer these questions for ourselves. Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. Thus magnetized by experience, our compass continually points toward those who suffer.[/b]

Somewhere in there is something approximately true.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

That and holes.

That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.

Or so they tell themselves.

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it.

So far, he thought, all of mine have been pretty much the same.

…no one asks poor people if they want war.

Though many of them still vote for it. Or die in it.

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.

If this isn’t Hell already.

[b]Neil Gaiman

And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means “that thing over there.”[/b]

Actually, it means “that alleged thing over there.”

Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all.

Anything big ever happen here?

We talk about the ‘miracle of birth’ but what about the ‘miracle of death’? We have the science of death pretty much figured out, but death’s magic and inevitability have been feared and ignored for a long time now.
What if Death is a person?

Don’t look at me.

The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs. People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

And how scary is that?

They could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive.

Let’s take this to youtube.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.

Or, however remote, good philosophy.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The word ‘definition’ has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.” Willard Van Orman Quine[/b]

I know, let’s define “justice”.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

A new thread perhaps?

“More is lost by indecision than wrong decision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity. It will steal you blind.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

Still, some indecisions are [no doubt] all that separated us from calamity.

“Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

Imagine then his reaction to Don Trump.

“Politicians are not born; they are excreted.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

If not puked.

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” Euripides

Imagine then talking sense to a Kid!

[b]Dave Eggers

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.[/b]

May I be so bold as to suggest an alternative?
Though, by all means, point taken.

It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.

And then there are the times it’s like that here.
Right, Kids?

What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I’ll stand before you and I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I’ve been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me-- Oh do it, do it motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally.

That goes for all the fatherfuckers too.

I see colors like you hear jet planes.

If only shades of blue, he thought.

Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.

Indeed, some are fuming now more than ever. Though it never really bothered me at all.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

Not unlike integrity.

[b]Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.[/b]

All these insights and it rhymes too.

I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.

The best of both worlds.

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.

And of course with each passing year more and more do.

Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it.

Close enough?

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.

If you want to call being a wage slave a career.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

Or, in particular, both.

[b]Werner Twertzog

How about instead of playing the National Anthem before U.S. sporting events, there could be an inspirational reading of the Bill of Rights?[/b]

They’d never stop laughing.

Life is a parade of absurdities and pain, and then we die, alone, in filth. So, yes, little girl, I shall buy a box of Thin Mints.

Not much that can’t be put in perspective.

In the vastness of space, a billion-trillion intelligent beings are extinguished every second, so tell me again about the long lines at the grocery store.

Not much that can’t be put in perspective.

Why can’t I be happy?
]Because happiness does not exist.
Why can’t I be loved?
Because love does not exist.
What can I do?
Wait awhile, you’ll die eventually.

After all, no one has not died yet.

Optimists are happier, and live longer, because, as we all know, they are less intelligent.

Fucking idiots is what they are.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

If only on reality TV to start.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can grow wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes, and says, is always true.[/b]

I know: If only that were actually true.

Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.

You either learn this or you don’t.

Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a lot more besides.

Written today, of course, he would have.

Here’s to the thorn in the flower!

The bigger the better!!

Life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. It’s when you burn a slow fire and save fuel that life’s not worth having.

You know, when it’s not the other way around.

He knew his heart’s core was a fat, awful worm. His dread was lest anyone else should know. His anguish of hate was against anyone who knew, and recoiled.

Either that or did not recoil at all.

[b]William F. Buckley Jr.

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.[/b]

Of course that works the other way around too.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

Any liberals like that here? Any conservatives?

The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense — the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

Remember how he handled it? On a boat 12 miles out.

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

Let’s pin down who they are.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.

I think he means the government.

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Woody Allen.

[b]God

Sometimes I wish I were real.[/b]

Sometimes I wish you were too.

I apologize to the depths of My being for creating and embodying the patriarchy.

In other words, so much for being omnipotent.

I will be meeting in person with Chuck Grassley very shortly.

You know, when he dies of natural causes.

Expect disappointment and you’ll never be disappointed.

Like it can ever actually work that way. For, to cite just one example, mere mortals.

Most people use only 10% of their democracy.

And even that’s the wrong 10%.

If I could create the world again I’d do it sober.

And, if I were sober, I’d let Him.